Book review: The Friendly Ones, by Philip Hensher

There is a Victorian amplitude to Philip Hensher’s tenth novel, though, happily, it’s not in any way a pastiche or what is loosely called Dickensian. Actually, if Hensher recalls any Victorian novelist, it’s Thackeray, not Dickens. He deals in life as it is, without melodrama, but not without horrors. It is the story of two families, neighbours in Sheffield by chance in the way people become neighbours. The novel opens with a party given by Sharif and Nazia, immigrants from what is by the Seventies, Bangladesh; Sharif teaches at the university, and the party is their house-warming. Next door lives a retired doctor, Hilary Spinster, whose wife is dying in hospital; they have four grown-up children but it has not been a happy marriage. An accident, requiring Dr Spinster’s medical intervention, brings the two families together.